Rally for Chibok girls

The Bring-Back-Our-Girls (BBOG) campaigners will hold a rally in Abuja on Tuesday to mark the six months of the abduction of 219 pupils of the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Borno State.

The girls were forcibly taken by Boko Haram gunmen from their hostel on April 15. Doubts on their whereabouts were cleared when the girls were shown in the sect’s video, dressed in Islamic apparel and reciting the Qur’an.

The BBOG group has been drawing the world’s attention to the girls’ plight.

The leader of the BBOG, Aisha Yusufu, said yesterday that the planned rally would be used to let the world know that six months after, the girls are still in captivity and to insist on the rights of the girls.

“It is high time we rallied together and make sure that we make the appropriate demand to the authority to do the needful to rescue these girls and bring them back.

“We are looking at the rally this time around being big but at the same time, we have resolved that even if it is only 10 of us, we will still do our protest but we want people to come out and join us; we hope that Nigerians will come out collectively.

“It is six months; everyday that those girls are there is evidence that we are not important because if anyone of us is in the same situation, nothing will be done.

“We are hoping on it taking place all over the world. We see that with the day of the girl-child coming up, we know that to every girl-child, action they say speaks louder than words. You are telling the girl-child that she should go to school but yet we see those girls that have dared to go to school and have been abducted for six months and the whole world has done nothing. That speaks louder than any narrative that you go and tell a child.

”It’s been half a year that those girls have been gone. Each of us should look at our houses and think of if any of our child or anybody from our neighbourhood faces the same fate, how painful it will be.

”You can imagine for everyday in six months, those girls have been going through all manner of terrible things that we cannot imagine.

”It was really painful the other time when the President said it was three months of their abduction when it was actually over five months. That tells you the importance the government attaches to the rescue of these girls.

”As a country, I think that we have fallen almost to our greatest low for these girls to still be missing after this long period ýand for every child/ girl-child out there, we have shown them that they don’t matter because they now see it as 219 of their colleagues taken away and the nation is doing nothing. That is a new low for us as a nation.”